Acquired Intelligence: Acquire Advantages

Expert Systems

An expert system is a computer program that provides expert advice (decisions, recommendations or solutions) as if a real person had been consulted. These systems capture and deliver knowledge that is not easily represented using traditional computing approaches. They can retain the knowledge and experience of anyone in an organization (including people who are retiring), pre-process information to increase an expert's productivity, or allow someone with less training to perform functions at a higher level. Expert systems can be used to gain access to expertise immediately, around the clock, by many people at the same time.

In operation, expert systems can act as:

a librarian helping people find, organize and interpret information required to carry out a task;

an advisor embodying and sharing specialized expertise needed by others;

a trainer helping others learn tasks and become experts themselves;
an assistant handling routine problems and tasks so experts can deal with more demanding work.

In addition to the nature of the task that expert systems are suited for, the actual structure or architecture of expert systems differs from traditional software. An expert system is composed of two independent parts: an inference engine and a knowledge base. The inference engine is the control structure of the program that implements the knowledge represented in the knowledge base. The knowledge base is where the real power of the expert system resides: the coded pool of rules, insights and knowledge that the person doing that task brings to bear on it. This two part structure results in two important features of expert systems:

It allows the system to be modified, updated and expanded more readily than traditional programs making it easier to keep the system current with changes in the field, or with changes in users' requirements, and
It allows the system to provide an explanation of the reasoning behind it's conclusions which is necessary to provide the credibility and confidence that people require before routinely accepting it's advice.

*a librarian*	helping people find, organize and interpret information required to carry out a task;
*an advisor*	embodying and sharing specialized expertise needed by others;
*a trainer*	helping others learn tasks and become experts themselves;
*an assistant*	handling routine problems and tasks so experts can deal with more demanding work.